UberX and mismatched furniture: How Trump campaign is reining in costs as it prepares for general election

As former President Donald Trump gears up for a costly general election campaign with President Joe Biden and faces staggering legal expenses of his own, his campaign is actively working to keep costs in check.

Senior adviser Susie Wiles has privately joked that the campaign staff call her a “miser” — and she’s not entirely wrong.

After a recent event, one Trump staffer was discussing the Uber he took home before quickly clarifying to the group that it was an UberX, and the cheapest available option. “Susie would kill me if she thought I spent more than I had to,” the person noted, implying that Wiles paid such close attention to the line items that she would notice a lower-level staffer’s car choice – a potentially marginal cost difference.

Senior adviser Chris LaCivita, meanwhile, has privately grumbled that the former president’s signature large rallies are too expensive. He has encouraged the team to make a concerted effort to host his events at smaller, less costly venues, according to conversations with multiple Trump advisers. He has also said publicly that the former president has stopped hosting as many rallies due to the enormous cost.

“Any organization that is concerned, or at least puts that level of concern, at the forefront, you’re gonna get better bids for business,” LaCivita told CNN about the campaign’s attempt to cut costs across the board. “If you’re not spending the majority of your money on touching voters, and pushing your candidate, then you’re not running a good campaign.”

One of the driving forces for why the Trump campaign has been so diligent about cost-cutting, the advisers say, is because they fear a repeat of the former president’s 2020 general election financial struggles, when the campaign burned through hundreds of millions of dollars in a matter of months that left Trump’s team facing an alarming cash crunch weeks before the November 2020 election.

In addition to reining in spending on rallies and transportation, the campaign is also keeping a tight leash on the money being spent on hotels, meals and other everyday expenses typically associated with a large political operation, the advisers say. Even the furniture found in Trump’s state headquarters across the country has been meticulously chosen so as not to accrue superfluous costs, one senior adviser noted.

“Anyone that’s ever worked on a campaign knows that, at the headquarters, the furniture should be functional, and that’s it. Mismatched and functional is the decor of the Trump campaigns’ offices,” a senior Trump adviser told CNN. “We don’t have mahogany desks, and if we do, they’re 200 years old and they’re falling apart.”

The senior Trump adviser noted that the 2020 campaign “went broke.”

“From our standpoint, we look at everything through that prism,” the adviser said. “The leadership of the campaign is intent on ensuring that that does not happen in this campaign, because that is the greatest sin that can be committed in politics.”